Take Down Joe Mullin's New Snowden Article

The problem is that there is always more to do than we have time for. So budgeting is necessary, and in this instance, we felt the weight of considerable media attention. We were getting emails, phone calls, and I half suspected someone to show up at my house. In the moment, it felt as though we needed to cover it and cover it quickly.

I was on a call with Ken during all of this, he finally gave up trying to talk to me so he could deal with NBC et al blowing him up.

Thank you for your statement, Ken (and thanks also to Aurich, who's been in here as well talking about Ars' position over the past few days).

I don't believe that the motivations of anyone involved in producing these articles is suspect, and I do not agree with the premise of the OP that they should be pulled from the site. But, I do feel that the pieces fall far short of the quality that I've learned to expect from Ars Technica over the past fourteen years. You have consistently set a higher standard than this; please don't let that standard be ignored or discarded in an unnecessary effort to be timely.

I appreciate the more measured response. I still do disagree with you in some ways, mostly in that perception is reality in many ways on the Internet, and that the "framing" of the first article especially detracts from any contribution it could have made to the developing story. I can still wish you guys had put up a more thoughtful profile of the GF, considering she has her own Internet freedom stance, and it would have been an interesting contrast to Snowden's own acts, but it got lost in the titillation factor that was much more prominent.

That said, I will apologize for my own "framing" of my objections to the stories. I still think they are very lacking, but I should not have impugned your character with my complaints.

I am sure that the pictures wouldn't have been embedded if the woman wasn't attractive, nor would extra attention have been given to the contents of her Twitter feed. Then again, that is the way media works, right? And Ars has proven that they no longer hold themselves to a higher standard than conventional mainstream media.

Re: HOOHA

I think that it was needlessly irrelevant. As others have said, you could have done a lot more than you did. It's a trashy article that barely contributed more than the girlfriend expose. It does seem kind of like selling him out, regardless of his posting history being public record. Confirming that he used to post here and maybe a brief, factual article about him would have been sufficient. Taking the high road and not delving into his GESC posts, dredging up some pictures, etc. would have still provided you with that all important "at all costs" ad revenue without it reading like a tabloid and sullying the front page and irking many of your most loyal supporters.

The fact that "well, buzzfeed posted it already, so we can too" is brought up as justification saddens me. I hold Ars to a higher standard than Buzzfeed, and everybody else should too, including your staff.

I had been postponing on renewing my sub, but I don't think I am going to bother in the near future. However, if I end up in Snowden's position and find myself one of the most talked about people in North America, I hope that you get millions of clickthroughs and ad views by dissecting my posting history, maybe creating a nice little character assassination through a couple of trashy, vapid articles that barely touch on the topic at hand.

As for the content I have left here in the last 10+ years and whatever I may post in the future.. you're welcome, and I hope I can be a cash cow for you one day. /s

edit: I am just going to convince myself that the reason that all Ars staff ardently support the articles is due to a company policy where dissension is not permitted to be aired publicly and that at least someone had some objections.

While the paid staff are obviously drinking the HQ Kool-Aid, it's refreshing to see that some of the moderators (which are the ArsT interface for forum goers) are comfortable enough to air their concerns with the articles.

I am sure that the pictures wouldn't have been embedded if the woman wasn't attractive

We always, always fight to embed photos of the people we cover. If it's a lawyer in a cowboy hat we're going to get it in there if we can (real example that people who read the story will remember I'm sure). That often means hunting down the owners to the photo rights and getting permission, and it can be a pain and take time, but we do it anyways. If there are easily available photos that we can use that's always a big plus, but it's irrelevant who the subject is, we still want to depict who we're talking about.

That's very different from Ars going into its private, secured registration database and then publicly announcing that, yes, [forum name] == [real name], oh and here's the email address he used to register at our site.

We did not "confirm" it was him in the manner you just depicted. We said it looked like him, which everyone else had _already said_ for the same exact reasons. Snowden published his registration email address himself, and had done so on other sites. We believe strongly that those posts are his, but not because of a database registration. In fact, the very idea that a simple email address can magically "confirm" someone's identity doesn't even make sense. There is nothing in his profile, public or otherwise, that can prove that it was him. The belief that it is him is based on circumstantial information, no different from that used by everyone else.

This is why you will not find a single media report confirming that the posts were made by him. I was contacted by over a dozen major media outlets, and I could NOT confirm that it was him. And I have full access to everything. And even if I could personally have discovered this somehow, I would not have confirmed or reported that information.

Finally, Joe does not have access to that database, no do editors in general. The number of people with that access is very limited.

I appreciate the correction on this. Indeed, I was mistaken in stating that Ars publicly made the explicit connection in the manner I described. However, with respect, that second story very clearly confirms that connection. It confirms it in the title ("NSA leaker Ed Snowden’s life on Ars Technica") and it continues to confirm it throughout the article. For example:

Quote:

Whether Snowden is a hero or a traitor is a matter of opinion. But one thing that's become clear as a matter of fact in the past few hours is that Snowden was an active Ars Technica reader and poster in our forums.

His username, "The True HOOHA," was revealed in a profile of Snowden published by Reuters earlier today."

When it's Ars publishing this, the implication is that Ars is confirming Reuters' revelation as accurate. The fact that Joe later hedges his bets by saying, "Under that username, posts went up that strongly suggest the user is Snowden", doesn't change anything. The rest of the article is full of language that equates the one with the other, rather than simply alleging the connection.

Bottom line: Joe represents Ars. As such, his article will inevitably - and I think reasonably - be inferred as authoritative on this subject, even if it takes the same form and uses precisely the same, publicly available information as those published by other outlets.

Thank you for the clarification Ken. Perhaps your posting of it on the Snowden article should become a featured comment just so it can rise to the top and be seen and not lost in the conspiracy theories.

We of course were not aware of the media pressure you guys had. We didn't get the context of you guys trying to give us context.

Bottom line: Joe represents Ars. As such, his article will inevitably - and I think reasonably - be inferred as authoritative on this subject, even if it takes the same form and uses precisely the same, publicly available information as those published by other outlets.

Yet I have media asking me to confirm that the user was Snowden at this very hour...

What you have is Joe, along with Reuters, etc., agreeing that this guy looks like the real deal. That is not a confirmation by media standards (I know, I know, here I am talking about the media again). We're pretty damn sure it's him, but we cannot confirm it anymore than anyone else can on the planet (well, aside from Snowden I guess).

I feel as though I've explained the reasoning for the stories many times. I suppose one last attempt might be appreciated by someone.

Thank you for this elaboration. I really appreciate it. Clearly, we don't see eye to eye on this issue and clearly my expectations of what I think Ars should be when it comes to this kind of subject do not jibe with yours.

The story, imo, is not the human angle. The story is the leak - what was leaked, why it was leaked and what that means for all of us. I honestly don't see how Snowden's opinion on Max Payne 2 from ten years ago, or Mills' woe-is-me posts of loneliness and a link to attractive photos of her in her underwear (since removed) add anything of value to that story. This is the most significant leak of secret government documents since the Pentagon Papers. That demands, imo, the same level of journalistic rigor afforded that momentous event. Just as the non-tabloid media in 1971 never reported on Daniel Ellsberg's teenage opinions of [random thing that had nothing to do with the government conducting secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos and lying about it to the public], so Ars should never have reported on Snowden's teenage opinions on computer games, or his girlfriend's lonely blog posts. This could have been handled differently, but instead we got a pair of articles that would've felt at home on Gawker or TMZ or [some other trashy, tabloid site] and a lot of talk about how other, also reputable outlets were publishing similar things.* Maybe I'm naive to expect that Ars should never stoop to that level, but stoop it has and that's a shame.

I'm really hoping that when this chatter dies down, you and your team will recognize the unprecedented reaction that these articles have received and take the opportunity to assess the direction you want to go when it comes to reporting on stories like this one. Ars has proven itself repeatedly as capable of far superior more impactful, more relevant stories than these - Ars is better than that and you've spent years cultivating a fantastic site that attracts readers and staff members who think this way. Long may that continue.

* To which I feel I should say, so what? Imo, those reputable outlets screwed up too!

I should clarify that by "framing" I really mean something more akin to: a kind of thesis, an explanation of what we believe the take away points are, etc. Sometimes we do this, other times we don't. It usually depends on how obvious we think a story's import is. Clearly in this case we were wrong about how people would feel with the framing as it was.

Thank you, this is all I think most users really wanted to see when we so clearly had issues with the article. It's reinstated a lot of faith in Ars to me.

Second, as already pointed out, the fact that other outlets made the [forum name] -> [real name] connection earlier doesn't magically absolve Ars from the privacy obligations - whether express or implied - it has toward its users.

Why not? Especially if the "privacy obligations" are "implied" by the user, for no good reason.

Aside from the aforementioned "taste" issue, what is the problem with Ars reposting stuff that's already been "outed" by many other news sources?

As far as I can tell, from what the article said, and what Ken and Aurich have said, they posted absolutely nothing that was not already public information, and posted by other sources. And even then, they chose to leave certain portions out.

Like I said, you may think that Ars "should" be above this, and that's fine. But they didn't post about anything private; they only seem to have included stuff that everyone else already had access to, and is being reported on.

The fact that "well, buzzfeed posted it already, so we can too" is brought up as justification saddens me. I hold Ars to a higher standard than Buzzfeed, and everybody else should too, including your staff.

I keep seeing statements like this, and I have an honest-to-FSM question for you:

If you read on dozens of news sites that Snowden was most likely a fairly active member of Ars, and then you came to Ars to saw nothing posted about it, wouldn't that strike you as strange? Wouldn't you be like "WTF Ars... this seems like big news, why aren't you're commenting on it?"

Like I've said before, I would have been more surprised by Ars' silence on the matter by them posting something which some of your find in poor taste.

If you read on dozens of news sites that Snowden was most likely a fairly active member of Ars, and then you came to Ars to saw nothing posted about it, wouldn't that strike you as strange? Wouldn't you be like "WTF Ars... this seems like big news, why aren't you're commenting on it?"

It's not even a hypothetical. There was plenty of contact like that from users once the story broke elsewhere. That's how I learned about it, actually.

If you read on dozens of news sites that Snowden was most likely a fairly active member of Ars, and then you came to Ars to saw nothing posted about it, wouldn't that strike you as strange? Wouldn't you be like "WTF Ars... this seems like big news, why aren't you're commenting on it?"

No. If I was an active member curious about a news event involving an active member, I'd check the Lounge. As it happens, there's a thread.

If ars never got around to commenting officially (in the thread or otherwise), I'd assume that there was some sensitive aspect to the story.

Otherwise, I'd expect to see an informative, well-researched, and well-written article posted in a day or two if the involvement was sufficiently newsworthy as to merit a full story. Another possibility is a placeholder link to an existing article about Snowden with a few late-breaking facts tacked on as an addendum.

Note that I'm answering your speciifc question- I understand Ken's situation in which the phone was ringing off the hook with calls from people who are not regular users.

I feel as though I've explained the reasoning for the stories many times. I suppose one last attempt might be appreciated by someone.

Thank you for this elaboration. I really appreciate it. Clearly, we don't see eye to eye on this issue and clearly my expectations of what I think Ars should be when it comes to this kind of subject do not jibe with yours.

The story, imo, is not the human angle. The story is the leak - what was leaked, why it was leaked and what that means for all of us. I honestly don't see how Snowden's opinion on Max Payne 2 from ten years ago, or Mills' woe-is-me posts of loneliness and a link to attractive photos of her in her underwear (since removed) add anything of value to that story. This is the most significant leak of secret government documents since the Pentagon Papers. That demands, imo, the same level of journalistic rigor afforded that momentous event. Just as the non-tabloid media in 1971 never reported on Daniel Ellsberg's teenage opinions of [random thing that had nothing to do with the government conducting secret bombings of Cambodia and Laos and lying about it to the public], so Ars should never have reported on Snowden's teenage opinions on computer games, or his girlfriend's lonely blog posts. This could have been handled differently, but instead we got a pair of articles that would've felt at home on Gawker or TMZ or [some other trashy, tabloid site] and a lot of talk about how other, also reputable outlets were publishing similar things.* Maybe I'm naive to expect that Ars should never stoop to that level, but stoop it has and that's a shame.

I'm really hoping that when this chatter dies down, you and your team will recognize the unprecedented reaction that these articles have received and take the opportunity to assess the direction you want to go when it comes to reporting on stories like this one. Ars has proven itself repeatedly as capable of far superior more impactful, more relevant stories than these - Ars is better than that and you've spent years cultivating a fantastic site that attracts readers and staff members who think this way. Long may that continue.

* To which I feel I should say, so what? Imo, those reputable outlets screwed up too!

Regarding Snowden on Ars:

First, Snowden inserted himself into the story as soon as he came out. He didn't have to. Mark Felt didn't, for example. But Snowden felt it was necessary. Perhaps it will serve him well, and provide him some degree of protection. Perhaps it won't. Either way, the story is now more than just the leaks. Yes, I know he says that he doesn't want to be made the story, but that's too bad. He doesn't get to set the agenda. Reporting background, biographic information is standard procedure. It's something that Ars does routinely in other stories. This one should not be any different.

Second, Snowden's background--MCSE, IT guy, system administrator--informs our interpretation of the coverage. It could explain, for example, why the original WaPo and Guardian stories misinterpreted the PRISM programme and why both ultimately backed down from their initial claims regarding the NSA's access to these companies' systems. These incongruities didn't make sense at first; the strong denials, the $20 million pricetag, and the newspapers' claims couldn't be reconciled. But as someone working in an IT capacity with a clearance, Snowden would likely have access to information about programmes he was not directly involved with and had no first-hand knowledge of. With that, the apparent misunderstanding of the source material starts to make sense. The journalists appeared to have no guidance from their inside man, and it's quite likely he wasn't in a position to give that guidance. It might also explain his apparent naivete vis-a-vis press freedom and surveillance in Hong Kong.

Third, it sheds some interesting light on the issuing of clearances and hiring policies. He openly expressed interest in protecting systems against eavesdropping, and was explicitly opposed to at least some aspects of spying. This opens a few possibilities. One is that the background checks and hiring procedures simply didn't detect this kind of thing, which in some way feels to me like it undermines the government's capabilities to use Internet-originated data. Another is that they knew and didn't care, which calls into question their hiring processes.

Fourth, it humanizes him. It shows that he has interests that many of us can relate to, and that he followed those interests to a nerdy degree. It makes him someone that I think many of us can relate to. Moreover, it does so using his own words. It is not some journalists interpretation of Snowden; it is Snowden himself speaking.

I don't think that the post was stooping. The references to other publications or news services (e.g. Reuters, LA Times) that have written are not, I think, an attempt to claim that "two wrongs make a right". Rather, they're an attempt to demonstrate that the dismissal of the story as being "tabloidy" just isn't accurate. Yes, a tabloid might also publish a similar article, but that doesn't make such articles the exclusive domain of tabloids.

This is not to say that the post in question fully investigated all of these angles. It couldn't; time does in fact matter, other publications had run with the story already, and a straightforward piece was appropriate. But that's OK, because it's possible to write more than one post that touches on a given subject.

The pressure on you to comment was not something that immediately came to mind, so even though you were trying to "catch up" and get something out there, to many of us it seemed like a really rushed and poorly thought out story that felt really exploitive. I wouldn't have thought it was a good article even if the forum in question was unrelated to Ars. The way it was worded it also felt like you were confirming his identity, which is disturbing for the obvious reasons.

I don't have a problem that you excerpted some posts (you post it, it's public, end of story), but I do think a lot of the ones chosen weren't really relevant to the story, which is the information he released, not who he is. I think a better take would have been to quote any examples where he commented on the government, information security, etc, and then just liked to the posting history so people that were interested could go check out the rest themselves. Knowing he argued with Peter and GWT is not really exceptional or relevant.

I think the problem with this story was that it was so poorly put together, that it lent the impression that the only purpose must have been to titillate and to cash-in on the attention.

Much as the Posting Guidelines state that "substance is key to not being labeled a troll", the relative lack of substance in the article (compared to your usual fare) left it vulnerable to being perceived in the most negative light.

Quote:

Story #2, Snowden was an Ars user

I didn't mind this story nearly as much as the one about the girlfriend. A lot of the outrage earlier on seems to be because people mistakenly believed that Ars Technica "outed" one of their own, but as we know his identity here had been disclosed long before your story aired. For that matter, the Lounge thread predates your story.

I disagree with hux that a "human interest" piece is irrelevant. I'm interested to know who Snowden was, what motivated him, and how events have affected him and his loved ones.

Once again, however, the article simply wasn't a very good one. It felt like a lot of it was simply a rehash of the post-snooping that other outlets had already done of his posting history, it didn't really feel like much of an "original" article. I think a lot of the criticisms could have been mitigated if you'd have taken your time to put together a more thought out biography of Snowden, and combined the girlfriend and Arsian angles into a single piece.

In your defense, at this point you really don't have a lot to work with. Seven hundred some odd posts might seem "prolific" to some, but in our community someone who has that many posts and hasn't been seen in more than a year is basically a lurker. He really didn't have any "connections" here, all I could recall of him was playing the browser-based zombie game "Urban Dead" with him and dozens of other Arsians many years ago. So while he may have been a poster here, we really can't do much more than cull through his posting history the same as anyone else might do.

Now I may be moderately disappointed that these articles fell below the standards I've come to expect of Ars Technica, but I'll be honest when I say that I don't quite understand the level of outrage that has been generated. The occasional sub-par article hardly seems to be grounds to self-ban yourself from a community that many of us have grown up with, and I'm really saddened to see many people take that route. It might be one thing if you'd actually "sold him out" as many initially alleged, but again we know that not to be true.

Ken's explanation could have been a good response at the beginning of this sad little episode. from my perspective, I think it's a bit too weak and far too late. Neither article was (imho) informative to even a minor degree, nor even approximately "well-framed."

I accept without reservation that the *intentions* here were good. In particular, I feel the second article about the Ars posts was an excellent missed opportunity for some truly good and informative journalism - for example, PeterB's description in the article's comment section about how such posts could potentially be useful and informative was really, really excellent, and further highlighted just how completely and utterly useless the actual article was (as written).

I'm still struggling to see how the first article provided any useful information, though. I get the intent behind it, and I do get your point that biographical information is common and often useful (although, as a psychologist, I feel it's more often used for post-hoc rationalizations - people trying to play armchair therapist/scientist, relying on some sort of informal "great man" approach to understanding history and current events - than it is for true insight). That being said, I still don't see how the information in the article is anything more than "surprising event leaves tangential person confused," framed in an unnecessarily salacious and horribly, horribly ham-fisted manner.

I guess at the end of the day, many of us recognize that journalism (and, since you bring it up) the related task of historiography are *arts*, not sciences. Unfortunately, you guys gave us paint-by-numbers (and in the case of the first article, a paint-by-numbers upskirt). Then you spent far too many posts and far too many hours telling us that you were trying for DaVinci, that we just didn't understand, and that all the other artists were doing it.

Speaking only for myself, those are extremely weak justifications for extremely weak articles. I support investigative journalism VERY strongly - I think it's a basic necessity for a functioning, honest society, and I encourage it whenever I can with my subscriptions and page views at various news outlets.... but at the same time, journalists (and indeed, everyone else) need to balance the need for information against the potential costs to individuals... and against larger social constructs, like "privacy".

I do not get any sense from any of your responses (or, indeed, from any of the staff responses) that this particular calculus entered into the editorial decision making for these two articles (especially the first) at any point in time, before or after they were written. You have spent ample time discussing how the articles might have (if only they were written differently, if only they were framed properly, etc.) contributed to people's understanding of the issues. That's all well and good - they certainly might have, especially in the case of the second article. However, you have spent almost no time discussing how you balanced the value of that information against these other (potentially very important) issues that people have been mentioning - issues that have, in the past, been a core part of ArsT's editorial and journalistic focus.

PeterB made an excellent (imho) case that something along the lines of the second article could have real informational value, and many of us (though certainly not all of us) recognize that the "costs" of re-posting public posts (even ones made under quasi-anonymity) probably isn't particularly egregious. The first article is much harder for me to understand, even after reading all your reasoning. The attack on an individual's privacy was much more direct, far more tacky, and the "information" value was so minimal that it could have been reduced to a single sentence in a larger article. I think that almost everyone gets your general point that biographical info can be useful and relevant, but utility and relevance is not a binary indicator. Neither is "harm".

Was the information in the article extremely useful to readers? Was it only a teensy little bit useful? In the best of all possible worlds, with all the context and framing you might require to make the perfect article you envisioned in your head, how much would that value have changed? Would the information value of the articles have gone from "miniscule" to "very minor"? Is that enough justification? Did the value of the information outweigh the potential costs (personal or public) of publicly posting information from someone who had taken steps to remove themselves from the public eye, and who's only involvement in the whole affair was tangential and involuntary?

Reading all your comments and the comments of other staff, I don't believe that anyone at Ars asked themselves these questions. I believe someone thought that if an article had some non-zero (but not necessarily high) informational value, that was the only justification needed to move forward. I know you have lots of deadlines, and stories move fast. I understand how and why this sort of "laissez-fair" approach could become the de facto standard for writing and editorial decision-making at Ars, especially as you've increased the scope and volume of your articles over the years. I get it. However, I don't approve of the results.

I have been winding down my involvement in these forums for several years, but I still enjoyed the Observatory and the Programming Symposium quite a lot. I'd also become a regular consumer of the front page news (well, except for all the $&@! Apple articles). I especially loved the truly excellent science articles. I appreciate all you have done with this site, and it was personally a source of great information (and even comfort) when I was going through grad school.

That being said, I think the first article was so utterly poorly conceived - and the editorial "non-response responses" to *both* articles were so poorly handled for so very long - that I've decided to stop visiting Ars (and the Ars forums). I am also considering sending a polite written letter to Conde Nast, explaining my disappointment with the current editorial direction and explaining my intent to avoid other Conde Nast properties. (For me, that would mean a cancelled "Traveler" subscription, no more occasional newsstand copies of "Arch Digest", and no more clicking on links that go to Wired. Giving up Wired is easy, but I don't know about Arch Digest...)

I don't expect anyone to care about this (lol ragequit! Who are you again?), but it seems to me that this is the very most that I can do to express my sincere displeasure with this entire episode - from the actual writing, to the decision to publish the articles in their present forms, to the weak (and largely dismissive) responses that came from staff (most notably, the Editor-in-Chief) after the fact. This last response was a notably better, but it is too little, too late.

Thank you very very much for all your prior hard work on content I care about. I sincerely hope that in the future, you will spend a little more time considering the content you publish (both the general editorial direction, the editorial processes which control that content, and the actual content itself), as well as how you will choose to respond to people's concerns when such issues arise in the future.

You have decided to join a few others in ceasing to frequent Ars over this... but go several steps into absurdity by stopping everything to do with Condé Nast (and by your own admission, robbing yourself enjoyment of those publications) because one independent property had a fiasco?

The pressure on you to comment was not something that immediately came to mind, so even though you were trying to "catch up" and get something out there, to many of us it seemed like a really rushed and poorly thought out story that felt really exploitive. I wouldn't have thought it was a good article even if the forum in question was unrelated to Ars. The way it was worded it also felt like you were confirming his identity, which is disturbing for the obvious reasons.

I don't have a problem that you excerpted some posts (you post it, it's public, end of story), but I do think a lot of the ones chosen weren't really relevant to the story, which is the information he released, not who he is. I think a better take would have been to quote any examples where he commented on the government, information security, etc, and then just liked to the posting history so people that were interested could go check out the rest themselves. Knowing he argued with Peter and GWT is not really exceptional or relevant.

No, but knowing that he has no religious beliefs, for example, is striking, and adds to the gravity of his decisions. If you are a christian, and have a genuine belief that your time on earth is a temporary situation that will culminate in your eternal salvation, then it should, in principle, make this kind of action easier to make. Yes, it might harm you in the short term (I am doubtful that he will end up getting murdered by the CIA or anything, but prison time is not out of the question), but that is, in some sense, OK. It'll pass. The good stuff happens when you're dead anyway.

But as a de facto weak atheist the situation is rather different. It makes the sacrifice so much greater, because this is the only life you have. There's no heaven later to make up for the misery of your mortal existence. You just die, having led a miserable life.

Thanks Ken for clarification on the motivation for posting those stories. For me I've been able to realize how unconfidential ars is to the outside world. Unfortunately, my primal scene has happened with ars.

Say I was to leave ars could all my posts be deleted on request?Not that I don't like it here or anything, just you know asking...

No. We don't delete posts, we feel very strongly about maintaining a public record of Ars. This is a real founding principle of the forum, stemming from Ken's background as a historian, and there were times back in the day when our requirements to not delete things were actually a real pain, from a technology standpoint.

But you could go out there and start deleteing your posts, that will accomplish both your goals, lock you out of ars and remove your history.

Not that I would consider it, it's an option. I hope we are past those dark days when people deleting their posts in a fast moving thread causes the forum to crash. That may have been back in the Infopop days.

Bottom line: Joe represents Ars. As such, his article will inevitably - and I think reasonably - be inferred as authoritative on this subject, even if it takes the same form and uses precisely the same, publicly available information as those published by other outlets.

Yet I have media asking me to confirm that the user was Snowden at this very hour...

What you have is Joe, along with Reuters, etc., agreeing that this guy looks like the real deal. That is not a confirmation by media standards (I know, I know, here I am talking about the media again). We're pretty damn sure it's him, but we cannot confirm it anymore than anyone else can on the planet (well, aside from Snowden I guess).

Yes, you already said that. It's beside the point I was making, which was about reader perception. Whether or not you provide that confirmation to other media outlets, we, the readership, have been presented with an Ars article headed, "NSA leaker Ed Snowden’s life on Ars Technica", subheaded "Snowden was TheTrueHOOHA, anime fan, gamer; he opined on government, too", and whose content comprises multiple statements in agreement with that subhead, with a small section buried in the middle, laying out the case for drawing that conclusion and saying that it only appears that the two are one and the same.

Do you honestly believe that it's unreasonable to read that article and come away believing that Ars has confirmed the link? Come on. It's the most reasonable, most obvious inference. And plenty of people are only going to read the first couple of paragraphs anyway, or even just the headline in the story list.

I appreciate the considered response. I understand where you're coming from and in fact I agree with most of what you said. (Most of it didn't actually disagree with what it was responding to.) Where we differ is the part where you imply - correct me if I'm wrong - that everything in these two articles is relevant and worthy of publication on the basis that it's informative and humanizing in a usefully biographical way. Sorry, but I just don't see that. I see a couple of things here and there and whole lot of low-brow, irrelevant and/or tabloid-style fluff.

I'd love to read a well-constructed, thoughtfully put together biography piece that gives us some insight on Snowden, the man, in a way that helps us better understand his motivations and the impact of his decisions. Ars is absolutely capable of doing a bang-up job in that dept. These two articles were a long, long way from that, though.

Second, as already pointed out, the fact that other outlets made the [forum name] -> [real name] connection earlier doesn't magically absolve Ars from the privacy obligations - whether express or implied - it has toward its users.

Why not? Especially if the "privacy obligations" are "implied" by the user, for no good reason.

Hmm, I think there may be a misunderstanding here. What I'm referring to there are privacy obligations expressed by Ars to its readers and subscriptors, whether in the form of official privacy policies, implications (e.g. your registration email listed in "Private profile fields" in the profile control panel), or through the historical convention of never having revealed that kind of information in the past (AFAIK).

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Aside from the aforementioned "taste" issue, what is the problem with Ars reposting stuff that's already been "outed" by many other news sources?

I already gave my opinion on that in the post you quoted: Ars confirming* the link carries a very different weight and has very different implications than some other site concluding the link via its own investigation and assumptions. Given the existing privacy relationship between Ars and its readers, I think it was bad form to respond to the investigative speculation that Snowden == TheTrueHOOHA by publicly saying, in so many words, "Yep, he was that guy on our site (and btw, here's the proof that your speculation is probably right)." That could've been very handled differently. As it stands, the implication of the "NSA leaker Ed Snowden’s life on Ars Technica" article is that any forum member can expect a similar level of public exposure, should they suddenly find themselves newsworthy. I'm gonna guess that's probably not what Ars wanted to put in people's minds!

I appreciate the considered response. I understand where you're coming from and in fact I agree with most of what you said. (Most of it didn't actually disagree with what it was responding to.) Where we differ is the part where you imply - correct me if I'm wrong - that everything in these two articles is relevant and worthy of publication on the basis that it's informative and humanizing in a usefully biographical way. Sorry, but I just don't see that. I see a couple of things here and there and whole lot of low-brow, irrelevant and/or tabloid-style fluff.

I'm not talking about the girlfriend article. I'm talking solely about the second article. And, yes, I think everything in there was reasonable.

Hmm, I think there may be a misunderstanding here. What I'm referring to there are privacy obligations expressed by Ars to its readers and subscriptors, whether in the form of official privacy policies, implications (e.g. your registration email listed in "Private profile fields" in the profile control panel), or through the historical convention of never having revealed that kind of information in the past (AFAIK).

You can't "reveal" something that's not hidden in the first place, though.

Even if you expand the definition of "reveal" to mean "point out to outside sources," that's still not what Joe/Ars did. Other sources discovered this information all on their own.

As I keep saying, you may think that this sort of article is "below" Ars' normal standards, and that's a perfectly valid opinion, but I just don't see how there's just any reasonable way to conclude that Ars leaked, revealed, or "betrayed" anything.

I *do* agree with you that the wording was ... unfortunate, to put it mildly, in that it definitely seems to tacitly, if not explicitly, confirm that TheTrueHOOHA is Snowden. However, you're a reasonable guy, so surely you can admit that this is pretty thin. Yes, there was "only" speculation about the link between the two prior to Ars' article, but it's not like the article offered any conclusive proof. 99% of the article was just rehashing what everyone else had already said.

Could they have worded it better? Yes. Does the way they did word it somehow push the article from "in poor taste" to "a grievous betrayal of trust"? Not in my opinion, no.

That is why I think categorizing this as some kind of "outing" or betrayal of trust is a huge overreaction.